The case

“ I can not open the embedded document” the user told me.
“Ah”, I thought, “I have once solved a case for that”.
“Please ask the site owner to make sure the library opens in the client application” I told the user. “Because embedded documents do not open in the online version“.
I thought that was the end of it, but some time later the site owner contacted me, telling me that the document library always opened in client so he did not understand what I meant.
To be honest, I did not understand it either anymore, so I needed to put on my sleuthing hat.

The investigation

I checked the library and the settings. Yes, the library was set to open in the client.

I selected the document and opened it with Word. No problem.

I asked the user which version of Word he had. A recent client version.

Then I checked his permissions to the site. Somehow or other I always end up checking permissions. The user had Read permissions, as expected.

The user was in the Visitors group with Read permissions to the site (In Dutch it is “Lezen”)

I looked at the items with different permissions and noticed that the document library had different permissions from the site. There I saw that the user had been added with View Only, which according to the description means: View pages, items, and documents. Any document that has a server-side file handler can be viewed in the browser but not downloaded. File types that do not have a server-side file handler (cannot be opened in the browser), such as video files, .pdf files, and .png files, can still be downloaded.

In the Document Library this group has “View Only” permissions.

6. I gave my colleague the same permissions to the site and checked what happened. Indeed, she could only open documents in the online version with that role.

The user could only open documents in Word Online. No option to use Word Client.

The solution

The site owner had inherited the site and did not know why this permissions set had been given. To be honest, I have never used it so I wonder what people use it for.
I explained the situation and told him that the determining factor was the need to see the embedded document.

If the user had no need for the embedded document, he could leave the permissions as they were.

If the user needed to see the embedded document, he still had two choices:
– Make the document available in the document library, instead of embedding it, and leave the permissions as they were
– Give the user Read permissions

Tips:

Be aware that people with View Only can also not Copy or Move.

There are no Copy To or Move To options when you have View Only

@Site Owners: stick to the standard roles as much as possible

@Site Owners: always ask your predecessor for the why if you see any strange things when the old site owner hands over the site to you. (Yes, I know this will not happen, but a support girl can dream 🙂 )

@Support people: You will have noticed by now that you should always check
– Client/Online opening behaviour
– Classic/Modern settings (they are not an issue here, but have been unexpected causes of issues in other cases)
– AND permissions

About SharePoint Holmes:
Part of my role is solving user issues. Sometimes they are so common that I have a standard response, but sometimes I need to do some sleuthing to understand and solve it. As many of my readers are in a similar position, I thought I’d introduce SharePoint Holmes, SharePoint investigator, who will go through a few cases while working out loud.